It was between nine and ten, and we found
the widow had been washing, the clothes hanging from lines in the
room. Her two children, aged nine and eleven, were busily employed in
matchbox-making.
"The rapidity and neatness of these little human machines were truly
most remarkable; the number of boxes made in a day, from half-past
six in the morning to ten at night, was something fabulous. The floor
of the room was covered with boxes; they earned a shilling each a
day; often days passed when they were unable to get work to do. Poor
children! thin and wan-looking, life seemed a terribly serious thing
to them, their days spent in incessant toil when work was plentiful,
their nights--well, they had a bedstead with a bundle of dirty rags
for a bed, but not a stitch of bedclothes; the clothes the children
wore were their only covering at night.
"In another court we found a silk-weaver hard at work,--from eight
in the morning to eleven at night. This man, a Christian, had
formerly been a weaver of velvet, but finding that a living could not
in any way be made out of it, in an evil hour he was tempted to go
into a skittle-alley as a helper. Here, though receiving good wages,
he found he could not be happy,--could not 'abide with God;' so he
gave it up, and now he is earning barely tenpence a day; but hard as
his lot is, he is happy in the consciousness of doing right, and
still manages to spare a little time to take his reading-lesson from
the Bible, and to tend a flowering-plant, his only companion, which
representative of the vegetable world seems to have nearly as hard a
struggle to live as its master.
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